Local pols demand President Biden aid city during migrant crisis
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City elected officials, led by Queens Assemblymember Jenifer Rajkumar, rallied at City Hall on Monday to call on increased federal assistance for the asylum seeker crisis. Photo via Assemblymember Jenifer Rajkumar/Twitter
By Ryan Schwach
Less than a week after nearly 60 New York City elected officials penned a letter to President Joe Biden calling for increased federal support in dealing with the migrant crisis, several of them rallied outside City Hall on Monday calling for Biden’s backing.
The officials, led by Queens Assemblymember Jenifer Rajkumar, called on Biden to declare a state of emergency and expedite work authorization for the migrants. Rajkumar, who organized the letter sent to the president last week, has served as one of Mayor Eric Adams’ closest allies in Albany. Many of her requests made of the federal government on Monday have previously been vocalized by the mayor.
The lawmakers, all of whom were Democrats, called for increased funding, and called Biden “absent” and “asleep at the wheel” amid the crisis.
“President Biden, please take urgent action to help our city,” said Rajkumar, who has recently jumped to the forefront of this issue. “This is one of the most significant humanitarian crises that our city has ever faced, and we cannot face it alone. Our city needs help from the White House.”
Elected officials from nearly all five boroughs were in attendance on Monday to call for federal help, including Queens Assemblymembers Steven Raga and Ed Braunstein, Senator Joseph Addabbo, and City Councilmembers Bob Holden and Lynn Schulman.
“We cannot turn a blind eye to this humanitarian crisis any longer,” said Schulman, who also quoted Queens raised musical duo Simon and Garfunkel’s “Mrs. Robinson.”
“Where have you gone, President Joe Biden?” she said. “New York City turns its lonely eyes to you.”
On top of increased funding and financial support, the officials also called for the federal government to create a plan to send migrants at the southern border to various cities across the country, and not just New York City. They also repeated a call for expedited work authorization to get migrants into self-sustaining employment.
“It’s common sense,” said Rajkumar. “It's a bipartisan fix.”
The call for expedited work authorization has been echoed for months by a number of elected officials, including Adams.
“We need [migrants], we have a labor shortage, there are jobs to be filled,” said Chelsea and Hell’s Kitchen Assemblymember Tony Simone. “I went to visit one of the asylum seeker hotels in my district, and moms were asking us, they want to work.”
In recent months, a lot of the work trying to get migrants into jobs has been done by local groups and nonprofits, who are beginning to be overwhelmed, they said on Monday.
“I'm here to say that at [New Immigrant Community Empowerment] we believe in all immigrant workers, we invest in them every day,” said Nilbia Coyote, the executive director of New Immigrant Community Empowerment, which operates in Jackson Heights. “Since last spring, we have been receiving a thousand people on average per month, and we don't turn around no one. We open our doors, we welcome them, we invest in them, we have a strong and powerful workforce development program to build their skills.”
Coyote says that NICE works to find asylum seekers work, either on or off the books.
“We need investment in our city with that we need them to see us, to see our nonprofit organizations as the people who are also doing much of this work,” she said.
The call for increased federal assistance comes as a 1,000-bed Humanitarian Emergency Referral and Response Center, otherwise known as HERRC, was officially announced for Creedmoor in Eastern Queens last week. The plan was met with ire from local elected officials on both sides of the isle.
Officials have argued the Eastern Queens location lacks resources for migrants, and would be a poor shelter site due to its isolation.
“This is in Eastern Queens, there's very little transit – it's in the middle of a residential neighborhood,” Braunstein said on Monday. “It's a lose-lose for everybody. It's not a good situation for the community, and it's certainly not a good situation for the asylum seekers.”
“The city cannot continue forward at this pace, and I join my colleagues here to call on the Biden Administration to finally intervene – it's time to declare an emergency,” he added.
Officials, including Rajkumar, have also pushed back against a proposal to bring a similar shelter to Aqueduct Racetrack in South Queens. While the city has yet to officially announce a shelter will be built at the racetrack, city officials said last week that all available housing options are “on the table.”
Recent efforts by the city to ease the crisis, including Adams’ 60-day rule which dictates that adult migrant men and women can stay no longer than 60 days in a city shelter, have been met with mixed reactions.
Over the weekend, multiple outlets reported that asylum seekers had taken to sleeping on the street outside of Manhattan’s Roosevelt Hotel, seemingly without another housing option.
On Monday, the Legal Aid Society threatened legal action if the city doesn’t soon provide shelter to the asylum seekers.
“Denying new arrivals placement and forcing people to languish on local streets is cruel and runs afoul of a range of court orders and local laws,” Legal Aid said in a statement. “The multiple stories and photos that have circulated on social media and reports from our clients who are stuck without shelter is both heartbreaking and maddening, and should this continue, we will have no choice but to file litigation to enforce the law.”
Mayor Eric Adams said that 93,000 people have come through the city during the asylum seeker crisis. File photo by Michael Appleton/Mayoral Photography Office
On Monday, Adams told reporters that 93,000 immigrants had come through the city during the migrant crisis, and echoed the calls for more federal assistance while also defending his administration's response thus far.
“We need help and it's not going to get any better,” Adams said. “From this moment on, it is downhill. There is no more room.”
“My congressional delegation is calling for it, my local electeds are calling for it, we are calling for it, we need a response from Washington and I have not gotten a yay or nay, and we need it,” he added.
Adams said that the city needs to “localize the madness” and figure out how to manage the lack of room indoors.
“We have to figure that out and that's what I got the team working on right now, and when we roll out to the next phase of this, I'm going to publicly announce it,” he said.
Officials within the mayor’s administration claim the city has spent $1.5 billion on the asylum seeker crisis thus far and that they expect to spend at least $4 billion by the end of next June, though that figure has been disputed.
